Doped aluminum-based inorganic oxides such as garnets (Y3Al5O12), Nd:YAG, perovskites, and ruby find widespread use as phosphors, pigments, catalysts, and lasing materials. Despite a broad interest, general synthetic methods to prepare such doped oxides are lacking, due to at least two reasons. First, it is a significant challenge to ensure homogeneous and atomic-scale dispersion of the dopant atom(s) within the aluminum oxide matrix. Second, it is difficult to prepare a given doped aluminum oxide in a variety of physical formats such as powders, films, or wires. Moreover, most synthetic methods require stringent processing conditions (e.g. physical and chemical deposition methods), or exceedingly high temperatures (e.g. ruby crystal growth or calcination of YAG materials produced via sol-gel techniques).